PeaceBang

Semi-Senior Moment

Before I head to the office, I have to ask all of you if anyone remembers mentioning that they would be coming to Boston and asking me if I was available to get together.
I remember either getting an e-mail or a blog comment to this effect before I went on my trip, and I don’t think I replied, but I certainly meant to.
I just have this vague recollection that someone cool from the blogosphere was coming to my area and I missed them, and I never told them I wasn’t able to visit with them.

Did I dream this?

Chris Penn Dies

Did you ever have one of those nights when you eat a really-too-big meal and you feel remorse as you lie in bed, thinking of how hard your body must be working to digest all those meatballs and all that pasta? And you really shouldn’t have had the tiramisu, and you think “I know I had a good workout today but my heart would be so much better off if I took off some of this lard, but god I love food just so much?”

Well, this story should bother you just as much as it bothered me. And it bothered me *that* much more since Penn and I are the exact same age:

http://entertainment.news.com.au/story/0,10221,17992934-7485,00.html

Salut y Forca!

For those of you following the correct pronunciation of the Barcelona toast, it’s here:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=9873156&postID=113835407388115242

Because of the origins of the name “PeaceBang,” we’re very devoted to toasts around here.

Salut!

I Wish They Knew How To Quit It

I read the latest issue of Premiere magazine while in Barcelona (a guilty pleasure at 6 euros) and just have to say this:

Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, ya’ll can stop giving interviews about how gay you AREN’T since the great, smashing success of “Brokeback Mountain,” ‘kay?

I mean, did Daniel Day Lewis need to keep giving interviews about how able-bodied he is in real life when “My Left Foot” was released? Did Al Pacino feel the need to constantly re-affirm that he can, in fact, see, when he played a blind man in the acclaimed “Scent of a Woman?” And how about Sissy Spacek? She’s not really a coal miner’s daughter, but she didn’t have to keep reminding interviewers of the fact when she played one in the movies.

Boys, enough is enough. We know ya’ll are actors. Actors play humans. Some male humans fall in love with, and like to make out with, other male humans. We know you’re not really in true life wild for each other’s mojos. You did a great job acting like it, though, which you should have, ’cause that’s your job and you get well paid for it.

Ladies, you doth protest too much. To gently misquote one of the finest lines in your film, I wish you knew how to quit it.

Passion Facade

Passion Facade
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Sculptor Josep M. Subirachs got a lot of flak for his (I think) brilliant work on the Passion Facade of La Sagrada Familia. He felt that it was impossible to try to follow Gaudi’s style after Gaudi’s death, so why try? What he created is, I think, an amazing and harrowing counterpoint to Gaudi’s own Nativity Facade on the other side of the temple.

There is an inscription on one of the bronze doors from the contemporary poet Salvador Espriu’s poem, “La pell de brau,” which begins,
“Sometimes it is necessary and right
for a man to die for a people.
But a whole people must never die
for a single man:
remember this, Sepharad.
Keep the bridge of dialogue secured
and try to understand and love
the different minds and tongues of all your children.
Let the rain fall drop by drop on the fields
and the air cross the ample fields
like a soft, benevolent hand.
Let Sepharad live forever
in order and in peace, in work,
and in difficult, hard won
liberty.”

(Sephared is Espriu’s name for Spain, after the old Sephardic Jewish word)

How could I not love a church with an inscription to tolerance on its own doors?

I’ve been googling images for the past fifteen minutes and I just don’t think there’s a photograph of this place that captures the sense of being there. When I looked up from the bus and caught my first glimpse of La Sagrada Familia, I just couldn’t catch my believe my eyes, but the photos all make it seem like some kind of tripped out religious version of Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyworld. It’s not like that at all. It… breathes. It has a pulse.

The Cathedral and the Temple

Cathedral, Seville
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Now, why is it that this cathedral in Seville should leave me so cold, while La Sagrada Familia Temple in Barcelona should cause me to break out into tears?

As I’ve said, I felt the spirit of Seville was not a good one. I got my Jewish dander up pretty high while there, and very liberal, muttering to myself about “well financed marauders” as I skirted the enormous, gold tomb of Christopher Columbus.

“Didn’t discover anything.

Conquered it, didn’t discover it.”

Mutter, mutter.

I thought it very humorous that my first efforts to visit the Seville Cathedral took me straight to the Exit sign. “Salida.” I also think it’s funny that on my first night in Cordoba, I got instantly lost on my way to a recommended restaurant and wound up stumbling about the twisting streets of La Juderia, the site of the old Jewish ghetto.

Yet when I caught my first glance of La Sagrada Familia, I felt it was a work of love, not of conquest. I felt it was the expression of an artistic vision rather than a monument to dominance, a beautifully insane explosion signifying creation itself, not just the Christian story.

If you google La Sagrada Familia, it will point you to all kinds of sites, which I encourage you to peruse. You will learn how Antoni Gaudi was entirely inspired by the natural world in all of his designs. I cannot begin to express to you how this orientation shapes the experience of La Sagrada Familia Temple, and how much of a difference there is in the spirit of a Cathedral –which is financed by compulsory taxes — and in the spirit of a Temple, which relies on independent gifts and contributions for its construction.

How often do you actually get to see a temple like this being built? It’s apparently going to take at least 25 more years, which gives me a great trip to look forward to in my 60’s. I want to see La Sagrada Familia when it’s completed. It will be a life goal.

Squirming on Sunday Mornings

ChaliceChick is hosting a really epic conversation about how to fix the UUA over at her blog, and when I’m done with this bout of jet lag I intend to read every posting and every comment, ’cause it’s fascinating stuff.

Tonight I just read this little bit about the old “too much politics” issue among us:

http://chalicechick.blogspot.com/2006/01/fixing-uuism-inreach-to-unchurched.html#comments

I heartily agree that there’s too much politics in our worship services, a fact which CSO says keeps him out of church (aside from the fact that he’s not a big institutionalist in the first place). And I know that Republicans have often been made to feel unwelcome among us.

But there’s something here that no one is saying and it’s beginning to smell like an elephant in the living room, and that is that because there’s so little understanding of what Unitarian Universalist worship should be among us — or perhaps so little consensus — what could (or perhaps should) be a deep encounter with moral issues in our worship services winds up not so much a deep encounter but a partisan tirade. I’ve talked about this a lot but here it is again, I guess.

UUs aren’t the only religious group possessing a glorious and complex theological tradition that gets ignored or trotted out in convenient sound bites during partisan sermons, of course. Conservative Christians cheapen their own theological traditions in the same way, hammering home the same exclusionary messages from their pulpits and propping them up with the same, tired Biblical passages and exegeses of those passages week after week. We could all be doing better.

When Chalice Chick says that we make Republicans feel unwelcome by demonizing their political commitments, I want to say, “yes… but.” Yes, but although it’s wrong to attack Republicans wholesale, it’s not at all wrong for liberal religionists to preach a firm and clear message about justice, God’s love, and other issues of ultimate meaning, and to use real life political issues as examples of how those values are or are not being promoted in the public realm. If people wind up squirming on Sunday mornings because their personal political commitments have not squared with the ideals of justice, love and peace taught by our liberal tradition, that’s okay. That’s not the same as being insulted. That’s having your conscience pricked, and it should be happening for all of us all the time in our worship services. It should be happening from the moment we gather and light the chalice and make some communal expression of reconciliation and hope; that return us to the “moment of high resolve,” as Howard Thurman so beautifully put it.

As far as the overly-political sermon goes, though, the only way to avoid speaking to issues of social conscience without descending into partisan haranagues is to fearlessly and unapologetically center ourselves in our theological tradition. One of the reasons the average seeker ends up thinking we’re not very religious is because our preachers use the NY Times to say what is all there in the pages of the Bible — in the OT and the NT, baby. Which, of course, I’m not allowed to say. I mean, I love Jonathan Kozol a lot, but it would be so great if I could quote him AND Jesus on occasion. Or how about Maimonedes? Again, I am thinking of the average seeker who would like to have some help getting how this groovy Sunday experience is a religious gathering.

Sure, as a preacher I can find some philosopher or social theorist to back up my claim that pre-emptive war is a moral disgrace, but then George Bush will bring out the big God-guns and fan the flames of hellfire and damnation about infidels, and my argument will seem pretty milquetoast by comparison. I’m a UU, though,* so I’m not allowed to bring on my own hellfire and damnation about how we’re all one people under God — I’ve got to keep it reasonable and intellectual and non-theistic so as not to seem anything like the crazy uber-conservatives — so again, I’ll be carefully citing some 20th century theorist while my conservative evangelical neighbor down the street gets to use the wildly gripping language of the psalms to give voice to his people’s anguish and desire for vengeance and domination.

So the seeker comes to the UU church and although she thinks she doesn’t want anything like that old Southern Baptist experience she came from, she just doesn’t feel from Annie Dillard and George Lakoff and Amitai Ezioni the same visceral punch she got from the ancient cadences of St. Paul. I wanted a new church that felt as powerful as my old church but for better reasons, she thinks, but I’m definitely not going to find it here.

This isn’t to say that UU preachers have to rely on the Bible. But we need more passion, more swing, more cadence, more straight shot can you feel it
gathering storm God is listening life is now are you in it or are you half dead get you in the guts musical don’t distance yourself uncross your arms set those feet to marching get those hearts to thumping stop quoting and start witnessing to the divine truth that you know you feel but you so carefully avoid claiming experiences in church.

In case I’ve been totally incoherent (and I’m very jet lagged, so I probably am), my major point here is that we should all feel stung and confronted and corrected in worship services, not for our politics but for our humanity, and for our many sins of commission and ommission. The whole point of growing a congregation of loving, warm, welcoming, supportive, humorous, compassionate and forbearing people is that we build a spiritual edifice strong enough to contain all that sin and guilt, to look at it wisely and bravely together at least every Sunday, and to hold faith for one another (and in one another)that we are nevertheless good and strong enough to get better at the project of being humans, onward and upward, forward through the ages.

*- as Jeff’s comment below reminds me to explain, my “I” in this posting isn’t about me, PeaceBang, but a hypothetical “I” UU minister or lay worship leader.

Isn’t This Nice

You can check out the nominees for the Second Annual UU Blogs Awards Contest here:

http://uupdates.net/uublogawards.php?step=nominees

Will there be a red carpet walk? Will I be accosted by Star Jones or Joan Rivers and her harpyesque daughter?

How fun!

My Last Day in Spain

I´m in Barcelona at an internet cafe right near the famous ¨La Boqueria¨market, and you can look forward (or not) to my posting thousands of photos of it when I get back, because I´m just saying that it´s paradise for foodies, and even if you´re not a foodie it´s still paradise, only with sheep heads and entire dead piglets in cases. It is the wonder of the food chain writ large, and with great beauty.
I just sat at a little bar with a naughty name (did you know that ¨Quim¨is a name in Catalan?)and had the most tasty, wonderful breakfast of fried artichoke hearts, some garlicky potatoes and two meatballs. All around me was the din of Catalunians shopping amidst miles of gorgeous produce and butcher stalls, and fish monger stands. I want to get one of those enormous cleavers so I can WHACK the hell out of my dinner preparations every night. It´s very satisfying. *whack!*

I had such a nice night last night meeting JAUME DE MARCOS of UU blogger fame. We met with another American UU (who has lived in Barcelona for 23 years now) and had tapas near the Cathedral, and drank cava and Jaume is just as cute and charming as you would imagine. We had a very interesting talk about the international Unitarian Universalist scene and I encourage you to learn all about it through the organization ICUU (I´ve got that wrong, right, Jaume? I hope you will comment and correct me).

Jaume is so much a gentleman that he won´t even tell you when you´ve got black eyeliner all smeared under your eyes and look like a very friendly raccoon. Muy simpatico.

I learned the traditional Catalan toast, which goes ¨Santa, forza y al canut!¨or something like that, which means, roughly, ¨Health, strength, and to the erection!¨ It´s a reference muy antigua to the time when people had their ¨canuts¨by their side, something like a horn, for protection. Or they kept their money in it. Again, Jaume will have to comment and clear this up for you. I intend to learn this by heart and use it all the time, as I think it´s the best toast I´ve heard yet.

Speaking of being by cathedrals, I visited the famous La Sagrada Familia temple yesterday and although I´m not in the habit of bursting into tears at the sight of enormous religious edifices, viewing this one for the first time was overwhelmingly emotional and I stood in front of it for the longest time, just wiping away tears and marveling. This may be the origin of the aforementioned racoon eyes (a girl sometimes forgets to look in the mirror when she´s traveling) and I promise to write more about it when I get home and can post photos. Let me just say that (1) it was a monumental shock to be so emotionally moved, because I just trotted off to see the thing with the attitude that, ¨oh, this is a big important site, can´t miss it¨and (2) Antoni Gaudi is my new hero.

I think that will have to be it for now, PeaceBangers. Love from Barcelona.

Celebrity Sighting

I forgot to tell you that I saw Owen Wilson at JFK airport on the way out of town!